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THE ABSURD TIMES

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: From http://www.whatnowtoons.com

Awhile ago, I mentioned that Randi Rhodes had been kicked off the air by, of all people, Air-America, for remarks she made about Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro. Seems the management has ties to Clinton somehow. Anyway, she made the remarks in a stand-up routine at a night-club and she had no "morals clause" or anything like that. Some people said the Air-America was "relieved" when she resigned.

Some of you wrote me and said I should contact the network and complain. Well, I had been trying to get an address and what I found out was that she was immediately snapped up by another network, NOVA. Most of Air-America's Affiliates' had contacted her as soon as they found out and she was already one the air before I could get around to complain.

She is on at 2, Central time, just google for a station close by. Nova is the network. Too many commercials, but she is funny. A welcome alternative to regular talk radio if you are interested. KPHX has a stream you can listen to even with dial-up. New stations are joining daily. Buffalo just joined.

________________________________________

Here's an interview with Noan Chomsky:

Tom Dispatch

posted 2008-02-26 15:13:30

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Terrorists Wanted the World Over

One of Noam Chomsky's latest books -- a conversation with David
Barsamian -- is entitled What We Say Goes
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805086714/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>.
It catches a powerful theme of Chomsky's: that we have long been living
on a one-way planet and that the language we regularly wield to describe
the realities of our world is tailored to Washington's interests.

Juan Cole, at his Informed Comment website
<http://www.juancole.com/2008/02/three-events-that-changed-world.html>,
had a good example of the strangeness of this targeted language
recently. When Serbs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, he offered
the following comment (with so many years of the term "Islamofascism" in
mind): "?given that the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox Christians, will the
Republican Party and Fox Cable News now start fulminating against
'Christofascism?'"

Of course, the minute you try to turn the Washington norm (in word or
act) around, as Chomsky did in a piece entitled What If Iran Had Invaded
Mexico?
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174797/noam_chomsky_on_the_iran_effect_>,
you've already entered the theater of the absurd. "Terror" is a
particularly good example of this. "Terror" is something that, by
(recent) definition, is committed by free-floating groups or movements
against innocent civilians and is utterly reprehensible (unless the
group turns out to be the CIA running
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/76824/mike_davis_return_to_sender_car_bombs_part_2_>
car bombs into Baghdad
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html?ei=5007&en=f6ed30bebf50f090&ex=1402113600&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position=>
or car and camel bombs
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2033/which_war_is_this_anyway_> into
Afghanistan, in which case it's not a topic that's either much
discussed, or condemned in our world). On the other hand, that weapon of
terror, air power
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/106273/air_war_barbarity_and_the_middle_east>,
which is at the heart of the American way of war, simply doesn't qualify
under the category of "terror" at all -- no matter how terrifying it may
be to innocent civilians who find themselves underneath the missiles and
bombs.

It's with this in mind that Chomsky turns to terror of every kind in the
Middle East in the context of the car bombing of a major figure
<http://warincontext.org/2008/02/24/guest-contributor-roger-morris-americas-shadow-in-the-middle-east/>
in Lebanon's Hizbollah movement. By the way, The Essential Chomsky
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581898/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(edited by Anthony Arnove), a new collection of his writings on politics
and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been published
and is highly recommended. /Tom/

The Most Wanted List

*International Terrorism*
By Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah,
was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without
this man in it," State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said:
"one way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of
National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been
"responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any
other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden."

Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the U.S. and
Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London
/Financial Times/ reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted
the world over," an accompanying story reported that he was
"superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after 9/11
and so ranked only second among "the most wanted militants in the
world."

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of
Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political
class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with
them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that
"the world" fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing
of Afghanistan. That may be true of "the world," but hardly of the
world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing
was announced. Global support was slight. In Latin America, which
has some experience with U.S. behavior, support ranged from 2% in
Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional upon the
culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later,
the FBI reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were
attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world
for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world."

*Following the Terror Trail*

In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we
might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated
arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.

The /Financial Times/ reports that most of the charges against
Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when
his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the
hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a U.S. Navy diver was
killed." This was one of two terrorist atrocities the led a poll of
newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top
story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner
/Achille Lauro/, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was
brutally murdered,. That reflects the judgment of "the world." It
may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.

The /Achille Lauro/ hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of
Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs
that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly
reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon
Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia
that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and U.S.
intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack.
Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister
Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the
Israeli action," which he termed "a legitimate response" to
"terrorist attacks," to general approbation. A few days later, the
UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of
armed aggression" (with the U.S. abstaining). "Aggression" is, of
course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But
giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us
keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.

A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the
leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who
denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism," again with general
acclaim by "the world."

The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext
for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in
Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do
with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was
a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus.
And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be
killed there.

The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the
perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in
international waters in which many victims were killed -- and many
more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held
without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has
been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal
can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such
regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the
national press in the U.S., and occasionally receive some casual
mention.

Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror, and is very
famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV
movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of
Palestinians -- "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin),
"drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful
Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be
"smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir). Or more commonly just "/Araboushim/," the slang counterpart
of "kike" or "nigger."

Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military
terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in
December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known
military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task
of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people
just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God
promised to us," a task that became far more urgent, and was carried
out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise
their heads" a few years later.

We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about
the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the
reaction to comparable U.S.-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for
example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians,
Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through
the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body
and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters,
along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was
shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove
over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs.
Jamal Rashid was crushed in /his/ wheelchair when one of Israel's
huge U.S.-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in
Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather
non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no
further commentary is necessary.

*Car Bomb*

Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist
crime than the /Achille Lauro/ hijacking, or the crime for which
Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the
same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize
for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.

One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque,
timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It
killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and
women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the
blast "burned babies in their beds," "killed a bride buying her
trousseau," and "blew away three children as they walked home from
the mosque." It also "devastated the main street of the densely
populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years
later in the /Washington Post/.

The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad
Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by
Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was
specifically authorized by CIA Director William Casey, according to
/Washington Post/ reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book /Veil:
The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987/. Little is known beyond the
bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do
not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to
suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad
apples" who were naturally "out of control").

*"Terrorist Villagers"*

A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime
Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese
territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council
orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called
"terrorist villagers." Peres's crimes in this case sank to new
depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words
of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply
supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to
"the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with
the usual conventions. We might well ask whether these crimes fall
under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of
aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel
and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.

These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people
elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world," when
considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly
implicated in a terrorist crime.

The U.S. also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double
suicide truck-bomb attacks on U.S. Marine and French paratrooper
barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58
paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the U.S. Embassy in
Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting
there of CIA officials at the time.

The /Financial Times/ has, however, attributed the attack on the
Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hizbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one
of the leading scholars on the /jihadi/ movements and on Lebanon,
has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group
called Islamic Jihad." A voice speaking in classical Arabic called
for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been
claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time,
but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.

The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it
is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an
attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack,"
particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy
naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the
U.S. provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south,
while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by
President Reagan when international protest became too intense to
ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.

In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly
described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases,
making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes
understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been
quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them
murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be
used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual
purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and
leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West
Bank. It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy
Carter's book /Palestine: Peace not Apartheid/ is the repetition of
this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the
motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and
desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be
misinterpreted, but this glaring error -- the only one -- was
ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to
useful doctrinal fabrications.

*Killing without Intent*

Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of
Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29
people, in response, as the /Financial Times/ put it, to Israel's
"assassination of former Hizbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air
attack in southern Lebanon." About the assassination, there is no
need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world
might have some interest in the rest of the story. Al-Mussawi was
murdered with a U.S.-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's
illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to
Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the
memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter
attack also killed his wife and five-year old child. Israel then
employed U.S.-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing
survivors of the first attack to a hospital.

After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the
game," Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset.
Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the
rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous
attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond
only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to
respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel.
The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an
invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and
killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far
as northern Lebanon.

In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a
"ghost town," Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an
Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to
destroy the village completely because of its importance to the
Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon." The goal was "to wipe the
villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around
them," as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described
the operation.

Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of
Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several
years earlier.. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile,"
British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were
presumably gunning for his wife and three children." Those who had
not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the /Financial
Times/, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses
is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters,
who? were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into
selected targets." Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a
rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.

All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who
understood the need to instruct the /Araboushim/ sternly on the
"rules of the game." And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man
of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, and
drugged roaches.

This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of
interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh
for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.

Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hizbollah defenses
against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an
intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world," which
understands that the United States and its clients must face no
impediments in their just terror and aggression.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly
explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and
Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their
killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral
depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of
Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective
punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity
(hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized
life).

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of
Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the
al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to
the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to
kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing --
so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the
response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at
self-justification.

To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes:
murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with
foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S.
atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel
destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the
West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular
people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot
reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the
al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian
catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this,
providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend
to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when
half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African
country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do
the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it
is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not
intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such
consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by /Araboushim/
in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather
differently.

If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we
might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over."

/Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political
works. His latest books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and
the Assault on Democracy
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082840/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
and What We Say Goes
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805086714/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
a conversation book with David Barsamian, both in the American
Empire Project <http://www.americanempireproject.com/> series at
Metropolitan Books. The Essential Chomsky
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581898/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics
and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been
published by the New Press./

Copyright 2008 Noam Chomsky

What a Week

THE ABSURD TIMES

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Bill Clinton before his defense of his wife, Hillary. Bill said, about Hillary, "After all, it was after 11:00, she was exhausted, and she's over 60" (Bill like blondes, Hillary used to have dark hair.) Another reason for the ilustration is just that I've liked Sheryl Crow since she was banned in Wal-Mart.

----------------------------------

Let's just review a few things that have happened in the last few days.

The Clinton headquarters in Indiana burned down and Bill said "We will rise from the ashes," an apparent reference to the Phoenix. I hope so. The Phoenix does that every 500 years according to the myth, so we will be safe for awhile.

George Bush said we will know when our job in Iraq is finished when it [Iraq] is able to help us fight our enemies! Guam? No, he probably means Iran.

Bowling seems to be an important factor in this election. Neither Hillary nor Obama were able to knock down more than one or two pins at a time. However, I remember George Sr. once demonstrating his style, which was ok, except he forgot to let the ball go and its momentum carried him forward and onto his face on the bowling lane.

A recent Poll indicated that a McCain/Rice combination would defeat an Obama/Clinton one. Why on earth would anyone take such a poll? It ain't gonna happen nohow noway anywhere not never. [Just practicing syntax in case I want to run for political office. Local Libertarians have talked about my running for Sheriff as I've told them I'd never show up at my office unless they let me smoke there.]

I've noticed that there is a lot of protest over the Olympic torch going around the world. The Dali Lama is against the protests. I don't follow - it would seem that American politicians, who are so fond of quoting Hitler, would like to keep this grand tradition he started alive. Munich. Jessie Owens. You know.

A bill has been introduced into the Senate to make John McCain a "natural born citizen." See, he was born in Panama, both parents citizens, so the citizen part is no problem. It's the word "Natural" that some people are worried about. It's absurd, of course, but that does not exclude it as important news.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Here are a couple articles about the cost of the occupation of Iraq. They seem appropriate as this is the bloodiest week of the year for American Soldiers in Iraq:

Three Trillion Dollar War Review

April 09, 2008 By *Girish Mishra*

Girish Mishra's ZSpace Page </zspace/girishmishra>

Karl Marx once remarked: "War in direct economic terms is just the same
as if a nation cast part of its capital into water." After many decades,
once again, the validity of this statement has been underlined by the
invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US-led coalition. A period of
more than five years has elapsed, yet there is no sign of freedom,
democracy and prosperity as promised to the Iraqi people. In fact, the
invasion and continued occupation has brought enormous devastation of
this ancient country, nor has it done any good even to the people of
America and its coalition partners. This has been analyzed at length in
a recently published book, /The Three Trillion Dollar War,/ by Joseph
Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.

No way, this book can be ignored by terming it as mere propaganda. Among
its authors is Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, who once
headed the team of economic advisers to President Clinton and then
became chief economist at the World Bank. His books have been widely
read and discussed all over the world. Linda Bilmes teaches at the
Harvard University and was once a high ranking official in the Clinton
administration looking after financial and commercial affairs.

At the time of American invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration gave
out that its aim was to liberate the Iraqi people from the clutches of
Saddam Hussein, giving them freedom and democracy and putting them onto
the path of happiness and prosperity and, this mission would cost just
$50-$60 billion. Lawrence B. Lindsey, then economic adviser to Bush,
dared challenge this figure as an underestimation and he was thrown out
of his job. He had predicted that the cost might be somewhere from $100
to $200 billion. To quote Lindsey, "My hypothetical estimate got the
annual cost about right. But I misjudged an important factor: how long
we would be involved." Five years after his ouster, he believes that
"one of the reasons the administration's efforts are so unpopular that
they chose not to engage in an open public discussion of what the
consequences might be, including the economic cost."

Just three months after the invasion, The Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace came out with its Policy Brief (no.24, May 2003),
"Lessons from the Past: The American Record on Nation Building." The
very opening paragraph said: "The real test for the success of the U.S.
preemptive war against the regime of Saddam Hussein is whether or not
Iraq can now be rebuilt after the war. Few national undertakings are as
complex, costly, and time consuming as reconstructing the governing
institutions of foreign societies. Even a combination of unsurpassed
military power and abundant wealth does not guarantee success, let alone
quick results. Historically, nation-building attempts by outside powers
are notably mainly for their bitter disappointments, not their triumphs."

The authors of the Policy Brief—Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper—pointed out
that the United States, till then, had used its armed forces in foreign
lands on more than 200 occasions and its nation-building record had been
utterly dismal. What they said has proved to be prophetic: "The internal
characteristics of Iraqi society will severely test Washington's
resolve, skill, and patience in pursuing its declared goal of political
transformation. With a population of 24 million, Iraq is larger than any
of the Latin American countries where the United States has attempted
nation building." With its deep ethnic divisions, the internal situation
would be too complicated for the Americans to deal with. "Outside
efforts to bridge such ethnic and religious divisions through
reconciliation have a poor track record—as has been demonstrated in the
former Yugoslavia." It would be extremely difficult "to align U.S.
strategic interests with those of the Iraqi elite and public."

Warning the hawks in the Bush administration, the authors said, "they
should reconsider their position in light of the sobering lessons from
American nation building during the past century. Aside from an overall
low rate of success, such unilateral undertakings have led to the
creation and maintenance surrogate regimes that have eventually mutated
into military dictatorships and corrupt autocracies. Repeating these
mistakes in Iraq, especially after President Bush's declaration of
American resolve to build democracy there, would be a tragedy for the
Iraqi people and a travesty of American democratic ideals."

Stiglitz and Bilmes have come out with a mass of data in their three
hundred and odd page book, underlining that Pei and Kasper were
perfectly right and Bush and his team completely wrong in going ahead
with their criminal act of invading and devastating Iraq. In the
process, they have harmed the very American people that entrusted them
with the reins of the state. Stiglitz and Bilmes correctly assert: "By
now it is clear that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake.
Nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and more than 58,000 have
been wounded, injured, or fallen seriously ill... One hundred thousand
U.S. soldiers have returned from the war suffering from mental health
disorders, a significant fraction of which will be chronic afflictions.
Miserable though Saddam Hussein's regime was, life is actually worse for
the Iraqi people now. The country's roads, schools, hospitals, homes,
and museums have been destroyed and its citizens have less access to
electricity and water than before the war. Sectarian violence is rife.
Iraq's chaos has made the country a magnet for terrorists of all
stripes. The notion that invading Iraq would bring democracy and
catalyze change in the Middle East now seems like a fantasy. When the
full price of the war has been paid, trillions of dollars will have been
added to our national debt. Invading Iraq has also driven up oil prices.
In these and other ways, the war has weakened our economy."

Till now, America has spent $600 billion on Iraq war. Stiglitz and
Bilmes have calculated, after taking into account both direct and
indirect, open and hidden, expenses and assuming that the war is going
to last a bit longer, that it will cost $3 trillion or, maybe, $4
trillion. Countering the argument that this is a very small sum for the
largest economy in the world, they say, "The issue is not whether
America can afford three trillion dollars. With a typical American
household income in 2006 just short of $70,000, we have far more than we
need to get by. Even if we threw 10 percent of that away, we would still
be no worse off than we were in 1995—when we were a prosperous and
well-off country. There is no risk that a trillion dollars or two or
three will bankrupt the country. The relevant question is a rather
different one: What could we have done with a trillion dollars or two or
three? What have we had to sacrifice? What is, to use the economists'
jargon, the opportunity cost?"

The opportunity cost of the Iraq war has been enormous. With the money
being spent on Iraq war, America could have easily solved its social
security problem at least for the next half a century. With one trillion
dollars, it could have constructed as many as 8 million new dwelling
units, employed 13 million more school teachers, provided elementary
education to 120 million kids or health insurance to 530 million
children for one year or granted scholarships to 43 million students for
four years. Multiply these figures by 3 and you get the opportunity cost
of $3 trillion to be gobbled up by the Iraq war. In a recent article in
/The Guardian/ (April 6), Stiglitz and Bilmes, while refuting Bush's
claim that the $3 trillion dollar estimate of the total cost may be
exaggerated, assert that it is "in fact, conservative. Even the
president would have to admit that the $50 to $60 billion estimate given
by the administration before the war was wildly off the mark; there is
little reason to have confidence in their arithmetic. They admit to a
cost so far of $600 billion."

Explaining why their estimates are different, they state: "Our numbers
differ from theirs for three reasons: first, we are estimating the total
cost of the war, under alternative conservative scenarios, derived from
the defence department and congressional budget office. We are not
looking at McCain's 100-year scenario- we assume that we are there, in
the diminished strength, only through to 2017. But neither are we
looking at a scenario that sees our troops pulled out within six months.
With operational spending going on at $12 billion a month, and with
every year costing more than the last, it is easy to come to a total
operational cost that is double the $600 billion already spent.

"Second, we include war expenditures hidden elsewhere in the budget, and
budgetary expenditures that we would have to incur in the future even if
we left tomorrow. Most important of these are future costs of caring for
the 40%of returning veterans that are likely to suffer from disabilities
(in excess of $600 billion; second world war veterans' costs didn't peak
until 1993), and restoring the military to its prewar strength. If you
include interest, and interest on the interest - with all of the war
debt financed - the budgetary costs quickly mount.

"Finally, our $3 trillion dollars estimate also includes costs to the
economy that go beyond the budget, for instance, the cost of caring for
the huge number of returning disabled veterans that go beyond the costs
borne by the federal government - in one out of five families with a
serious disability, someone has to give up a job. The macro-economic
costs are even larger. Almost every expert we have talked to agrees that
the war has had something to do with the rise in the price of oil; it
was not just an accident that oil prices began to soar at the same time
as the war began."

The Iraq war has adversely impacted not only the two sides involved in
it but also the world at large, especially the developing nations. As a
result of the war, while the demand for oil has increased, its supply
has declined as the production in Iraq has declined. At the time of the
invasion of Iraq, oil was selling $25 a barrel but now it can be had for
around$100 a barrel. In the years to come, it may go up to $125 a
barrel. The increasing price of oil has strengthened inflationary
pressures around the world. Besides, the production of ethanol and other
bio-fuels is being undertaken by diverting corn, sugarcane, soybeans and
other crops to it. This, in turn, contributes to the worldwide growing
shortage of food grains and pushes up the prices. The higher oil prices
have inflicted a direct cost to the world economy to the tune of roughly
$1.1 trillion.

Since the beginning of the Iraq war, America's national debt has gone up
by $2.5 trillion, out of which $1 trillion has been due to the Iraq war.
Bush, after coming to power, reduced the tax liabilities of the upper
income group people. It means the burden of meeting the war expenditures
has fallen more on the people at large. By 2017, it is estimated that
the national debt will increase by $2 trillion.

There are other adverse consequences that defy quantification. For
example, the morale of the troops is very low, there is a shortage of
wherewithal and there is a nationwide discontent because of insufficient
attention to the wounded soldiers. So far as the Iraqis are concerned,
more than a million people have perished. There is no law and order
worth the name. Anarchy reins supreme. As many as 45 per cent of the
families in Baghdad have lost their one or more members. There is a
large-scale displacement of the population. To quote Stiglitz and
Bilmes, "In human terms, it is the loss of life and the destruction of
Iraqi society that is the most egregious...

"For most Iraqis, daily life has become unbearable—to the point that
those who can afford to leave their country have done so. By September
2007, a stunning 4.6 million people—one of every seven Iraqis—had been
uprooted from their homes. This is the largest migration of people in
the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948."

As many as 2.4 million Iraqis have migrated to foreign lands, especially
Syria and Jordan, who are also feeling the strain. In all 20 per cent of
the pre-war population is displaced. Those who are left behind have
neither drinking water nor electricity. Schools and colleges do not
function because most of the teachers have either fled or been killed.
Hospitals suffer from lack of beds, doctors, nursing staff and medicines.

Iraq's museums have been looted and historical treasures have been taken
away. Valuable manuscripts have been lost, stolen or destroyed.
Christopher Hitchens says of Baghdad: "This is one of the greatest
centres of learning and culture in history. It was here that some of the
lost works of Aristotle and other Greeks... were preserved,
retranslated, and transmitted via Andalusia back to the the ignorant
"Christian" West." Naomi Klein, in her "The Shock Doctrine," has given
the details of the plunder and has also narrated how Iraqi economy has
been destroyed to make it pasture for the MNCs.

gmishra@girishmishra.com

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Iraq War Costs Skyrocketing, But Congress Unable to Scrutinize Spending

April 11, 2008 By *Jason Leopold*

Jason Leopold's ZSpace Page </zspace/jasonleopold1>

Nearly all of the $516 billion allocated by Congress to fund the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq has come in the form of emergency spending
requests, a method the White House has abused, depriving Congress the
ability to scrutinize how the Pentagon spends money in the so-called
global war on terror. The use of emergency supplemental bills to fund
the wars has likely resulted in the waste of billions of taxpayer
dollars, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability
Office.

Dozens of emergency funding requests that Congress has approved since
2001 is unprecedented compared with past military conflicts when war
funding went through the normal appropriations process. As of March, the
GAO said average monthly costs to fund military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan has reached roughly $12.3 billion, $10 billion for Iraq
alone, more than double what it cost to fund the war in 2004.

"Over 90% of [the Department of Defense] funds were provided as
emergency funds in supplemental or additional appropriations; the
remainder were provided in regular defense bills or in transfers from
regular appropriations," the report said. "Emergency funding is exempt
from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress's annual
budget resolutions. Some Members have argued that continuing to fund
ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight."

Vernonique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the
Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said funding the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars through emergency legislation is troubling because the
money "doesn't get counted in deficit projections, making it hard to
track the real cost of the war and effectively removing any upper limits
on spending for the war."

"Even seven years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, and five
years after the start of the war in Iraq, Congress and the president are
still using "emergency" funding bills to cover costs, rather than going
through the regular appropriations process," said de Rugy, who just
published an article on the issue, "The Trillion-Dollar War," in the May
issue of Reason magazine. "While other wars have initially been funded
using emergency supplementals, they have quickly been incorporated into
the regular budget. Never before has emergency supplemental spending
been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years."

Most troubling about this trend, the GAO said in a report issued in
February, is that while the Pentagon's budget requests has steadily
increased annually the reasons the Defense Department has cited to
explain its skyrocketing costs "do not appear to be enough to explain
the size of and continuation of increases."

"Although some of the factors behind the rapid increase in DOD funding
are known — the growing intensity of operations, additional force
protection gear and equipment, substantial upgrades of equipment,
converting units to modular configurations, and new funding to train and
equip Iraqi security forces — these elements" fail to justify the
increase, the GAO report stated, adding that "little of the $93 billion
DOD increase between [fiscal year] 2004 and [fiscal year] 2007 appears
to reflect changes in the number of deployed personnel."

Furthermore, a $70 billion "placeholder" request included in the fiscal
year 2009 budget that the Pentagon says will be used to finance
operations in Iraq does not include any details on how the money will be
spent "making it impossible to estimate its allocation," according to
the report.

The GAO added the Pentagon has used emergency supplemental requests to
get Congress to fund equipment and vehicle upgrades that would otherwise
come out of the Pentagon's annual budget. The Pentagon has succeeded
largely due to a new way it now defines the war on terror.

"Although some of this increase may reflect additional force protection
and replacement of "stressed" equipment, much may be in response to
[Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon] England's new guidance to fund
requirements for the "longer war" rather than DOD's traditional
definition of war costs as strictly related to immediate war needs," the
GAO report says, adding that Congress must immediately begin to demand a
more transparent accounting of Pentagon emergency spending in order to
put an end to the agency's accounting chicanery.

"For example, the Navy initially requested $450 million for six EA-18G
aircraft, a new electronic warfare version of the F-18, and the Air
Force $389 million for two Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft just
entering production; such new aircraft would not be delivered for about
three years and so could not be used meet immediate war needs," the GAO
report said.

On Wednesday, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee,
Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, said the military
will soon run out of cash if lawmakers don't act to approve a $102
billion emergency supplemental spending bill to continue funding
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We start running out of military pay for our force in June, we start
running out of operational dollars that we can flow to the force in
early July," Cody said. "It's all about time now. Those will be the
consequences of not getting the supplemental."

The GAO generally agrees with Cody, but said the Pentagon could dip into
its budget and transfer funds to finance operations in Iraq until late
September or early October, which would give Congress more time to
scrutinize the emergency funding request.

Still, these dire warnings from Bush administration officials and
military personnel about imminent funding shortfalls have become routine
since Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006. Last year,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates threatened to fire more than 200,000
Defense Department employees and terminate contracts with defense
contractors because Congressional Democrats did not immediately approve
a spending package to continue funding the Iraq war. The GAO and the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) advised Congress that Gates could tap
into the Pentagon's $471 billion budget to fund the war while Congress
continued to debate the merits of giving the White House another "blank
check" for Iraq.

Government auditors have said that these predictions are untrue and have
been cited publicly by the White House to prod Congress into quickly
passing legislation to appropriate funds. Republican lawmakers and
administration officials have also said failure by Democrats to fund the
war is tantamount to not supporting the troops. But the rhetoric has
been enough to spook Democrats into passing the emergency funding
requests, often without being aware of how the money is being spent.

Other federal agencies, including the Congressional Research Service
(CRS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have testified to
Congress about the limited transparency in DOD's emergency budget requests.

"While DOD has provided considerably more justification material for its
war cost requests beginning with the [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental,
many questions remain difficult to answer — such as the effect of
changes in troop levels on costs — and there continue to be unexplained
discrepancies in DOD's war cost reports, the GAO report stated.

That led the GAO to draft a letter to Congress March 17, saying the $108
billion the Pentagon has recently requested is based on "unreliable"
financial data and should be considered an "approximation," which,
technically, could be interpreted to mean the Pentagon's accounting
methods underestimated the cost of the war.

"Over the years, we have conducted a series of reviews examining funding
and reported obligations for military operations in support of [the
global war on terror], the letter, addressed to Congressional
committees, says. "Our prior work has found the data in DOD's monthly
Supplemental and Cost of War Execution Report to be of questionable
reliability. Consequently, we are unable to ensure that DOD's reported
obligations for [the global war on terror] are complete, reliable, and
accurate, and they therefore should be considered approximations...GAO
has assessed the reliability of DOD's obligation data and found
significant problems, such that these data may not accurately reflect
the true dollar value of obligations [for the global war on terror.]"

A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls for comment. But a GAO
spokeswoman said the DOD has been struggling with "deficiencies in the
Pentagon's financial management system" that contributed to the
unreliable data. She would not elaborate.

Although studies have surfaced stating that the cost of the Iraq war
could soar past $2 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office said trying
to estimate future costs for the war is difficult "because DOD has
provided little detailed information on costs incurred to date."

"The Administration has not provided any long-term estimates of costs
despite a statutory reporting requirement that the President submit a
cost estimate for [fiscal year] 2006-2011 that was enacted in 2004," the
GAO said.

/ /

/Jason Leopold is the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie,"
a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com <http://www.newsjunkiebook.com/>
for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored
award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to
Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the
Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a
series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
Leopold is working on a new nonprofit online publication, expected to
launch soon./

No to McCain

THE ABSURD TIMES

One of you posted an excellent comment and I thought it deserved a more prominent place.

I agree with all of it, although much of it has to do with his murders. The most absurd thing about McCain, as our contirbuter notes, is his own decision, we are told, to remain a prisoner of war. What is to stop him from saying "I did it, why not other U.S. Citizens?"

My comment is about McCain. In Viet Nam he was one of those fly boys who dropped millions of bombs on the north VN population, right? And they did it for quite a while with impunity until finally China or russia supplied the north with missles to bring down the bombers, right? And so they got a few prisoner airboys before they changed strategy to high altitude bombing. Since they were just bombing civilians and not strategic targets, that worked fine. So, how does that make him a war hero??? Then he doesn't have sense enough to use his get out of jail card. Does that show good judgement?? He speaks with this phoney soft voice while privately he is known to have anger management issues.

Meanwhile, he is an article about another Iriqi leader who actually deserves respect. When Saddam learned that his eldest son killed this man's father, Saddam almost killed him (Uday) and said "You might just as well killed me." This is the one Shia leader who did not hide out in Iran.

Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq

April 09, 2008 By *Patrick Cockburn*
Source: TomDispatch <http://www.tomdispatch.com>

Patrick Cockburn's ZSpace Page </zspace/patrickcockburn>

Join ZSpace <https://www.zcommunications.org/zsustainers/signup>

Muqtada al-Sadr is the most important and surprising figure to emerge in
Iraq since the U.S. invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the
religious and political movement of the impoverished Shia underclass
whose lives were ruined by a quarter of a century of war, repression,
and sanctions.

From the moment he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of Saddam
Hussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated
him. So far from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media often
described him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading his
followers.

During the battle for Najaf with U.S. Marines in 2004, the U.S. "surge"
of 2007, and the escalating war with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council,
he generally sought compromise rather than confrontation. So far from
being the inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed -- when he
first appeared they denigrated him as a /zatut/ (an "ignorant child," in
Iraqi dialect) -- he was a highly experienced political operator who had
worked in his father's office in Najaf since he was a teenager. He also
had around him activist clerics, of his own age or younger, who had
hands-on experience under Saddam of street politics within the Shia
community. His grasp of what ordinary Iraqis felt was to prove far surer
than that of the politicians isolated in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

*A Kleptocracy Comparable to the Congo*

Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up
unexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have
happened to Muqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their
political and religious platform had a continuous appeal for the Shia
masses. From the moment Saddam was overthrown, Muqtada rarely deviated
from his open opposition to the U.S. occupation, even when a majority of
the Shia community was prepared to cooperate with the occupiers.

As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew among
the Shia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that 73% of
Shia thought that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the security
situation worse, and 55% believed their departure would make a
Shia-Sunni civil war less likely. The U.S. government, Iraqi
politicians, and the Western media habitually failed to recognize the
extent to which hostility to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and, in
the eyes of Iraqis, delegitimized the leaders associated with it.

All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis supported
Saddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly
loyal Special Republican Guard units dissolved and went home. Iraqis
were deeply conscious that their country sat on some of the world's
largest oil reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector Clouseau-like
ability to make catastrophic errors in peace and war had reduced the
people to a state in which their children were stunted because they did
not get enough to eat.

The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-be
exploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the
same fury possessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier
in Shia Iraq in the coming years, this might have undermined the Sadrist
movement. Instead, people saw their living standards plummet as
provision of food rations, clean water, and electricity faltered.
Saddam's officials were corrupt enough, but the new government cowering
in the Green Zone rapidly turned into a kleptocracy comparable to
Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed the loathing with which the
government was regarded, and dodged in and out of government, enjoying
some of the fruits of power while denouncing those who held it.

Muqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of
this highly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father and
elder brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were
assassinated in 1999 he had every reason to stress his lack of ability
or ambition in order to give the /mukhabarat/ [Saddam Hussein's secret
police] less reason to kill him. As the son and son-in-law of two of
Saddam Hussein's most dangerous opponents, he was a prime suspect and
his every move was watched.

When Saddam fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears'
political inheritance and consciously associated himself with them on
every possible occasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I and
Sadr II [Muqtada's father-in-law and father, both assassinated by
Saddam] against a background of the Iraqi flag. There was more here than
a leader exploiting his connection to a revered or respected parent.
Muqtada persistently emphasized the Sadrist ideological legacy:
puritanical Shia Islam mixed with anti-imperialism and populism.

*Riding the Tiger of the Sadrist Movement*

The first time I thought seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in April
2003 when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend of mine,
Sayyid Majid al-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with whom I had
often discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the involvement of Muqtada
himself, which is a matter of dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist
supporters in the lynching is proven and was the start of a pattern that
was to repeat itself over the years.

Muqtada was always a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over,
sometimes controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and
actions were often far apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the Sunni
against the occupation, yet after the bombing of the Shia shrine in
Samarra in February 2006, he was seen as an ogre by the Sunni,
orchestrating the pogroms against them and failing to restrain the death
squads of the Mehdi Army. The excuse that it was "rogue elements" among
his militiamen who were carrying out this slaughter is not convincing,
because the butchery was too extensive and too well organized to be the
work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists and the Shia in general
could argue that it was not they who had originally taken the offensive
against the Sunni, and the Shia community endured massacres at the hands
of al-Qaeda for several years before their patience ran out.

Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious
leaders unequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on
Shia civilians if he was to cooperate with them against the occupation.
They did not do so, and this was a shortsighted failure on their part,
since the Shia, who outnumbered the Sunni Arabs three to one in Iraq,
controlled the police and much of the army. Their retaliation, when it
came, was bound to be devastating. Muqtada was criticized for not doing
more, but neither he, nor anybody else could have stopped the killing at
the height of the battle for Baghdad in 2006. The Sunni and Shia
communities were both terrified, and each mercilessly retaliated for the
latest atrocity against their community. "We try to punish those who
carry out evil deeds in the name of the Mehdi Army," says Hussein Ali,
the former Mehdi Army leader. "But there are a lot of Shia regions that
are not easy to control and we ourselves, speaking frankly, are
sometimes frightened by these great masses of people."

American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding of
Muqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul
Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were
persistent attempts to marginalize him or keep him out of government
instead of trying to expand the Iraqi government's narrow support base
to include the Sadrists. The first two elected Shia prime ministers,
Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, came under intense pressure from
Washington to sever or limit their connection with Muqtada. But
government officials were not alone in being perplexed by the young
cleric. In a lengthy article on him published in its December 4, 2006,
issue, /Newsweek/ admitted that "Muqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding
America's fate in Iraq." But the best the magazine could do to assist
its readers in understanding Muqtada was to suggest that they should
"think of him as a young Mafia don."

Of course, Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi leader
who proponents of the war in Washington had suggested would take over
from Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited,
English-speaking exiles who the White House had hoped would turn Iraq
into a compliant U.S. ally, Muqtada looked too much like a younger
version of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq,
which it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by
elections that would produce a government dominated by the Shia allied
to the Kurds. It soon became evident that the Shia parties that were
going to triumph in any election would be Islamic parties, and some
would have close links to Iran.

The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in the
Iran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis"
developing in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and
paranoia on the part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted
to make Iraq a client state they would have found the country as prickly
a place for Iranians as it was to be for Americans. It was the U.S.
attempt to create an anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into Iranian
hands and produce the very situation that Washington was trying to avoid.

The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its
nuclear program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had
the potential to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was
executed, Sadr I believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had
bad relations with Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shia
opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But
American pressure meant that the Sadrists had to look to Iran for help,
and in a military confrontation the Mehdi Army saw Iran as an essential
source of weapons and military expertise.

*The New Iraqi Political Landscape*

On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada
called for a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S.
occupation and al-Qaeda in Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The
call was probably sincere, but it was also too late. Baghdad was now
largely a Shia city, and people were too frightened to go back to their
old homes. The U.S. "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop in
sectarian killings, but it was also true that the Shia had won and there
were few mixed areas left.

The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security was
improving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were
returning. Muqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the
Sunni on a nationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never
accepted that their rule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live on
the same street, they could hardly share a common identity.

The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the
Sunni population turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge,"
but it was still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide
bombs targeting civilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni
sectarian warfare since 2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent
groups had turned against al-Qaeda after it tried to monopolize power
within the Sunni community at the end of 2006 by declaring the Islamic
State of Iraq. Crucial in the change was al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one
son from every Sunni family into its ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs with
the government such as garbage collectors were killed.

By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was trumpeting
successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been largely eliminated in Anbar,
Baghdad, and Diyala. But the Sunni Arab fighters, by now armed and paid
for by the United States, did not owe their prime loyalty to the Iraqi
government. Muqtada might speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi
opposition to the U.S. occupation, but many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters
had quite different ideas. They wanted to reverse the Shia victory in
the 2006 battle of Baghdad.

A new breed of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging. One of
them, Abu Abed, is a former member of the insurgent Islamic Army. He
operates in the Amariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a
commander of the U.S.-backed Amariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls
Concerned Citizens. His stated objectives show that the rise of the new
Sunni militias may mark only a new stage in a sectarian civil war.
"Amariya is just the beginning," says Abu Abed. "After we finish with
al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main enemy, the Shia militias. I
will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area near Amariya taken over
by the Mehdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of west Baghdad."

The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to Saddam
Hussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors in
Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Muqtada and his
movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning,
the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been
greater.

In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play
a central role. Muqtada probably represented his constituency of
millions of poor Shia better than anybody else could have done. But he
never wholly controlled his own movement, and never created as
well-disciplined a force as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his ambitions
for reconciliation with the Sunni could take wing unless the Mehdi Army
ceased to be identified with death squads and sectarian cleansing.

The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while violence
diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been resolved. The
differences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within the respective
communities, and the antagonism against the U.S. occupation are all as
great as ever. The only way the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army could create
confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant what he said when he
called for unity, would be for them to be taken back voluntarily into
the areas in Baghdad and elsewhere from which they have been driven. But
there is no sign of this happening. The disintegration of Iraq has
probably gone too far for the country to exist as anything more than a
loose federation.

/Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent in
London. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was recipient
of the 2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well as the 2006
James Cameron Memorial Award. His book *The Occupation: War and
Resistance in Iraq*, was short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle
Award in 2007. This essay is the last chapter in his new book, Muqtada:
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416551476/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
just published by Scribner./

*From Muqtada
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416551476/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> by
Patrick Cockburn. Copyright © 2008 by Patrick Cockburn. Reprinted by
permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.*

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which
offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom
Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, /co-founder of the American
Empire Project <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>/ and author of
/The End of Victory Culture
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq./]

free speech?

the absurd times

THE ABSURD TIMES

This is a tricky issue for me. I do like Air-America, but think they act like Nazis (or corporate Amerika) when they suspended radio host Randi Rhodes for the bit attatched above. I tried to post it as a video to show that it happened at a nightclum, not on the job, but it was over 12 MB and the sound isn't very good. Even this version, edited for sound, isn't very clear -- you may have to run your equalizer flat to really hear it. Essentially, she is doing standup, long straight hair with bangs, kinda buck teeth, and really having fun. You really need to hear the entire clip before you decide anything, but it seems to me entirely within the scope of her rights as she did not use these particular words on the air or as part of her job.

Any Reactions?

Charles